In today's world most of the application runs on VMs created on a Hypervisor cluster (e.g., HYPER-V™, ESX™, XEN™, etc.). These Hypervisors provide the computation power of a data center. In data center High Availability is ensured by replicating virtual machines between two or more sites (on different geographies). Replication provides high availability of virtual machines and applications running inside it but cannot provide protection from accidental deletion. So data protection is an important activity in data centers.
In a data center, servers such as HYPER-V™ servers and clusters provide the computation power. The servers are joined to create high available clusters. A cluster can be scaled to 64 nodes (e.g., servers) where 8000 virtual machines can be deployed. Data protection is an essential activity in data center. To save an application consistent image of a virtual machine (VM), there is a need to create check points of the VM.
A virtual machine is protected by creating a check point (without pausing the VM) representing a consistency point. The Hypervisor vendors provide functionality or application programming interfaces (APIs) for creating a check point where applications running inside the virtual machine comes to a consistent state. The check point creation of a VM or a set of VMs can fail in a data center for various reasons. Some reasons can be caused by the VMs such as there is no disk space inside the VM and some could be because of storage\network problems of a VM manager or VMM (referred to as a VMM node). It is difficult to check the events, configurations in each VMM node and VMs for troubleshooting in a data center.